Case Study: Vanderbilt University improves public transit efficiency with Google Cloud Platform

Vanderbilt Improving public transit system with Google Cloud's AI

Vanderbilt University, through its ScopeLab research team and SmartTransit project, needed a way to manage and analyze massive, irregular transit data streams from buses, weather stations, traffic sensors, and GIS sources to improve public transportation efficiency. Working with Google Cloud Platform and its Research Innovator program, the team used Google Cloud services including BigQuery and App Engine to store and process data at scale.

Google Cloud Platform helped Vanderbilt University build an energy visualization dashboard and support real-time analytics, offline model training, and scheduling tools for transit operations. The results include an estimated $150,000 in fuel cost savings for CARTA, more than 32.3 million electric-bus data points and 29.8 million diesel-bus data points collected, and a pilot showing over 40% potential efficiency improvement for paratransit and microtransit services.

Vanderbilt University

Abhishek Dubey

Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science